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I haven’t done much Web design or coding in the last while. I haven’t been teaching it either. But I still keep up with things and always at the back of my mind is the desire to redo my sites to look and do things better. One of the (still) frustrating things about putting a Web site together is making it look good and having it work in various browsers. It’s amazing how the Web has been around a relatively long time and many of us take it for granted, but it’s still hard to depend on everyone seeing everything the same way on a site. The standards haven’t changed that dramatically, but the adherence to the standards still isn’t completely there. One of the major resources that I’ve relied upon in the last few years has been A List Apart which is filled with great articles about Web design.
ALA just launched version 3 and it’s still a great resource. The look of this site grew out of an article on ALA and my desire to follow the standards and really separate content and presentation. But that’s another rant (but you really should be using CSS). The driving force behind ALA is Jeffrey Zeldman who is one cool standards-based Web designer who also wrote Designing With Web Standards and was one fo the people behind the Web Standards Project. Zeldman drives home the point and exemplifies the maxim that it is the content that is most important in what we produce.
One of the three articles in the new issue of ALA is a neat examination of some of the neat things you can do with CSS called Sliding Doors of CSS. Douglas Bowman explains how to use CSS to create a tabbed interface. It’s one of those articles that makes me start thinking about redesiging things. Even though I recently redid this site, this article makes me think that there is a better way to do some of the things that I’ve done with it.
If you not that geeky about HTML, CSS, and standards as I am… well, you probably won’t be that excited about ALA 3.0 firing up.